Growth Capital: Ready meals for kids are Hillary’s recipe for success

Monday 15 October 2012 10:29 BST

p38 hilary graves

Hillary Graves doesn’t have to employ expensive flavour consultants when perfecting recipes to build up her £10-million-a-year meals business. If her kids Ridley and Monty are fans, she reckons other children will be too.

If children like them, parents do, and if parents like them, supermarkets will too. So far, the theory has worked: Waitrose and Tesco have such a taste for her children’s ready meals that her company, Little Dish, sells 100,000 each week.

Inspiration came when Graves was pregnant. “I realised no one was making fresh, healthy food for toddlers and young children,” she explains. “There was the long-life food in the baby aisle — which can sit on the shelf for up to two years — or traditional ‘ready meals’, often made with additives, preservatives, salt and sugar. But I wanted to replicate what mums cooked at home: fresh, healthy meals made from 100% natural ingredients and no added salt or sugar.”

Graves had no experience of working in food. Her background was marketing but the American had worked in start-ups. She moved to London from New York in 2000 to open the UK office of the woman’s website iVillage, and says: “I much preferred that kind of culture to corporate life.”

Through work, she met John Stapleton, a food scientist who was a co-founder of the New Covent Garden Soup Company, and the pair realised “we wanted to work together. His background was food, mine was in marketing and business development, and we were both passionate about the idea behind Little Dish — making healthy children’s food available in the supermarkets.”

The duo wrote a business plan in 2005, and then went out to raise funds. “A couple of my friends who had set up a business put me in touch with some angels in the City, a group of wealthy investment bankers who invested in new businesses as a group,” says Graves.

“We showed them there was nothing like this business out there, plus all the market research we had done, first with family and friends and then with an independent research firm which revealed parents really were excited were about the idea.”

The angel investors, who included the founders of Innocent Smoothies, together with Graves and Stapleton’s family and friends, raised £450,000 seed funding. Adam Balon, one of the three who founded Innocent, also joined Little Dish’s board, as did Bryan Meehan, who set up organic grocery chain Fresh & Wild.

Cash in hand and advisers on board, Graves was working out of her Notting Hill home, creating recipes, getting her kids to test them and sourcing suppliers. She spent a long time, and considerable investment, working on Little Dish’s packaging.

“We wanted it to look different from traditional ready meals, which were dominated by supermarkets’ own-label brands, and had to be both trustworthy for mums and desirable to children.”

Getting retailers interested wasn’t easy. “We knew we had to sell in large numbers to make it viable, so approached supermarkets from the start,” says Graves. “It took about a year but in the first week, we sold out — we made 2000 meals and we couldn’t keep up with demand.”

That was helped by Little Dish’s grass-roots marketing. “We had no budget for it, but when Waitrose tested our meals at one of its stores, we went to the shop’s local nurseries and toddler groups to hand out leaflets and get the range known.

“Since healthy, prepared meals didn’t really exist for anyone in between babies and adults, we were creating a new idea and had to get parents to look for us in the aisles.”

Soon after Waitrose signed up Little Dish, Tesco did the same at 20 of its stores, which has since grown to 800. Revenues grew from £500,000 in the first year to double that in the second. After two years of growth, Greenmont Capital Partners — a US investment fund specialising in natural products, of which Fresh & Wild’s Meehan is a part — backed Little Dish to the tune of £1.5 million.

Nowadays Graves, 42, has expanded her taster panel beyond Ridley and Monty to brand ambassadors around the country who host local tastings for parents. This week, she is launching fresh pasta to add to Little Dish’s range. An array of healthy snacks for children is on the horizon next year.

The entrepreneur says she would ultimately consider a sale or float. But she’s not ready to let go of her business baby yet.

“It took us a long time to get this point — it was a real slog to get distribution organised around the country. Now it’s time to enjoy the growth.”

LITTLE DISH

Founded: 2006

Staff: Nine

Turnover: £10 million this year, up 30%

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